Last week saw thousands of public cloud professionals descend upon Chicago for AWS Summit 2016, where Amazon Inc. introduced a host of improvements for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The main focus of the rollout was the vendor’s storage lineup, which received two new low-cost disk options and a network optimization service for speeding the migration of data kept in object form.

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, as the latter addition is called, promises to cut the amount of time needed to move files in and out of AWS to as little as a third of what it was before. The firm hopes that the service will make its platform better-suited to support data-intensive workloads that previously took hours to ingest new records, or required an expensive private network link to avoid the delay. Its efforts are meant in no small part to counter Microsoft Corp., which has also been working to make its cloud a more attractive destination for organizations to store their information.

The day after the AWS announcements, Redmond rolled out two new analytics services for Azure designed to process video content, one of the fastest-growing types of unstructured data in the enterprise. The first offering provides the ability to automatically parse text displayed in clips, while the other enables organizations to scan their camera feeds for specific faces and expressions. Microsoft sees the functionality coming handy both for commercial applications like gauging customer sentiment and corporate security purposes.  

In particular, Redmond says that a company could use the technology to identify intruders caught on its surveillance cameras faster and filter out false positives. Organizations are also increasingly relying on cloud services for the security of their applications, a trend that has given Silicon Valley’s top investors a strong appetite for network protection startups. The most recent beneficiary of the venture capital community’s interest is Threat Stack Inc., which last week raised $15.3 million in funding from.Scale Venture Partners and a number of existing backers..

The cash will be spent on widening the adoption of its cloud-based monitoring service, which can analyze activity logs from a company’s on-premise infrastructure to identify security risks. That includes not only malware and application vulnerabilities but also authorized users who try to access data they’re not supposed to, according to Threat Stack.

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